Tag Archives: Housing Benefit

Diary Blog, 6 December 2022, with more opinion about “Jack Monroe”

Afternoon music

On this day a year ago

“Jack Monroe”

Those tweets refer to the apparently empty threat by “Jack Monroe”, the “Bootstrap Cook” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_Monroe#Legal_actions], to sue Con Party MP Lee Anderson [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lee_Anderson_(British_politician)], which threat was uttered sometime in early/mid May 2022, and widely reported by the Press on 15/16 May 2022.

“Jack Monroe” was going to sue, said the (((occupied))) Press, not only Lee Anderson but also the political commentator Martin Daubney, at least one of whom (Lee Anderson) had implied (indeed expressed) on TV that “Jack Monroe” is a fraud: he actually said “living off the backs of the poor“. I could not have put it better myself.

Well, here we are, nearly 7 months later, and there has been no action launched; nor even any pre-action correspondence sent.

Lee Anderson has already said that he has heard nothing from the woman or her lawyers (if any), despite the Press claims from May 2022, which seem to have been uncritically supportive of the egregious “Bootstrap Cook”.

While, technically, that leaves “Bootstrap Cook” with another 5 months to bring an action, I think that it is reasonable now to opine that there will be no defamation suit by “Jack Monroe” against Lee Anderson.

However, that is not the whole story: “Jack Monroe” asked people in general and her “supporters” in particular to send money to fund the (so far, non-existent) legal action. She implied also that her solicitor would be fanatical Jew-Zionist solicitor (based in Israel) Mark Lewis, about whom I blogged extensively some years ago: see https://ianrobertmillard.org/2019/01/11/update-re-mark-lewis-lawyer-questions-are-raised/. He himself has not tweeted anything about having been instructed or consulted on the Lee Anderson matter.

Now people are asking about where went the crowdfunded monies raised (assuming that there were some). “Jack Monroe” has not explained. The reasonable assumption, surely, is that she has had at least some monies from that source, but has either retained the monies or simply spent them.

It is a moot point, on those premises, whether “Jack Monroe” has committed a fairly serious criminal offence.

A black woman in Bristol is presently awaiting trial on what seem to be similar facts, involving a crowdfunding appeal for projected lawsuit(s).

The police and/or State regulators should be investigating all of this.

Likewise, as of today, 641 total mugs are sending “Jack Monroe” between £3.50 and £44 a month via the Patreon website, supposedly in return for goods and services never provided.

That’s anything between £2,300 a month and £30,000 a month (gross). “Not a bad little earner“…

“Jack Monroe” has taken money from, inter alia, the “poor” and vulnerable and, when asked to refund monies for non-performance, has refused, or has ignored the requests; on occasion, she has even insulted some of the poor and suffering people concerned.

“Bootstrap Cook” was promoted online by Nigella Lawson, it seems, though “that was then”. Not recently, as far as I know.

(is that last tweeter a so-called “sock account”?)

Why are quite a few other msm types, though —even after the recent intensified storm around her— still promoting this person?

Tweets seen

The strange thing is that mugs such as tweeter “@friendofsnoopy” seem to imagine that they are actually accomplishing something positive in socio-political terms by subsidizing the lifestyle of “Jack Monroe”. Very odd indeed. A psychologist might find the pathology of such pointless virtue-signalling interesting.

I note, also, that “@friendofsnoopy” still has a Twitter profile photo of herself wearing a facemask! The facemask nonsense is so yesterday…

“@friendofsnoopy” says that what “Jack” “does” is key for her. What she means is more like “what ‘Jack’ says she does”… It now turns out that her interaction with the Office of National Statistics and others amounted to nothing but one brief meeting with the ONS, not even noted because entirely unimportant; the same with other organizations. “Jack’s” aim was obviously to have such 5-minute “meetings” in order to be able then to tweet about them for years: the so-called “meetings” were obviously (in my opinion) merely and planned props in what others have called her “grift”.

Anyone can tweet or write “you can save money by buying cheapest pasta from ASDA or ALDI“, let alone something akin to “here’s a way to make a cheap dinner: a tin of chickpeas, a tin of peaches, and some curry powder. Mix, and heat.” Mahashma Gandhi?

Also, this constant “you too can live off a few pence a day” nonsense just reinforces the false idea that State benefits (and private pay) are sufficiently generous, if not too generous.

Meanwhile “Jack Monroe” laughs at the mugs who subsidize her, buys Tiffany ear-rings (£1,000+), by her own admission drank, in recent years, a bottle of whisky a day (she now monetizes even that, by virtue-signalling her supposed year or so of “sobriety”), and is alleged to be, or to have been, a considerable abuser of cocaine (admittedly, I have no evidence as to whether or not that is or was so).

All the same, look at the facts: several thousand pounds, possibly several tens of thousands, via Patreon each and every month, £24,000 (plus legal costs) from her Katie Hopkins libel action award, somewhere around £100,000 from book royalties in the past decade, other donations, paid Press and TV interviews and appearances, deals with ASDA etc to promote their stuff. Large amounts of money, and it has been claimed that “Jack Monroe” now has as much as £200,000 stashed away, yet she still “cosplays” the poverty thing, as if she is living on a few pounds a day.

At root, rent is the fruit of parasitism. People work to pay rent, but the rentier lives parasitically from that rent, i.e. from the work of the rent-payer.

I was once, in the early 1980s, somewhat acquainted with a wealthy property-developer who lived in West Sussex. His wife was a novelist of sorts, and had been published (by a real publisher, not via Amazon self-publishing or the like) several times. This in fact was well before Amazon; her first novel had been published around 1980 or slightly earlier.

Apparently, when her first book was accepted, that lady was asked to the publisher’s office. He congratulated her, and then counted out £600 in cash on his desk as an advance; she never earned any more from it. Not a fortune even 40+ years ago. Her later novels earned her even less. Fortunately, with a wealthy husband, that did not matter so much.

The “@AwfullyMolly” Twitter account is well worth reading.

Panicdemic

Out early in the car today. Listening for a while to Radio 4 Today, I was amused to hear the presenter, in a piece about the ridiculous Michelle Mone, talk about the “Covid panic“. Is the truth at least partly getting through, even to the minds of BBC drones?

More tweets

If, as American “gun nuts” claim, “the right to bear arms” is the last line of defence for American white people, then why (with tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans legally and/or illegally possessing weapons), is that anti-white hate-broadcaster still not minus a head?

I myself am not, as I have blogged in the past, “anti-gun”, but the fact is that possessing a weapon, whether a firearm or a cold weapon, is not, without more, going to achieve victory for social nationalism.

If anyone is interested, I myself was a member of a “gun club” in the days before Major and Blair used one of only two “spree shooting” massacres in English history (Dunblane; before that, there had been Hungerford) as an excuse to close down most private ownership of firearms. There has been one other such “spree shooting” since then, in Cumbria in 2010.

I belonged until the mid-1980s to the now more or less defunct Kensington Rifle and Pistol Club in West London , which was off the Cromwell Road, and not too far from the Earl’s Court Underground station. I believe that a rump of it still shoots at Bisley in Surrey, where I have not been since I was at school in the early 1970s.

I very much doubt that the rather staid civil servants and others who used the Kensington range, and the bar of the Club, were likely to break the speed limit, let alone any more serious laws (the only flamboyant character there was the TV actor Peter Wyngarde: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Wyngarde; https://www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2018/jan/18/legend-tributes-paid–cult-tv-star-peter-wyngarde).

I have had, also, and in the 1970s and 1980s, some limited experience of various firearms (shotguns, pistols, automatic weapons too) in other parts of the world: Central Southern Africa, Ireland, the USA etc, but have never been fascinated by weapons, and have never made the mistake of imagining that Mao’s dictum that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” is 100% right (though it is not 100% wrong either).

Ideology, organization, and discipline must come first in any serious social-national party or movement.

More tweets seen

Julian Assange should be released, and certainly never extradited to American “justice”.

SNP idiocy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mhairi_Black.

Vauxhall Tea House

Strange, nicht wahr? Jews and their “antifa” “useful idiots” can conspire to threaten both a London business and people wishing to hold a discussion and entertainment event, and the police do nothing. I wonder what the police reaction would be if Jews were to whine that they were being threatened. I think that we know the answer.

That is where we are now in the UK. “Occupied”. (((Occupied))).

Late tweets seen

Kennedy was right in principle but what threw his prediction off-course was something that he perhaps did not fully comprehend when young— meaning the Jew-Zionist control over the mass media in the USA and the rest of the “Western” world. TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, publishing (including academic and historical publishing).

Of course, such nominations would have been finalized some months ago, before the avalanche of accusation and evidence re. the “Bootstrap Cook”. I doubt that she will be nominated for any awards in the future.

The facemask nonsense and the rest of the “Covid” “panicdemic” lunacy still has a hold on a small (and mentally-screwed) part of the population.

Late music

Diary Blog, 18 January 2021, including some thoughts about Universal Credit and Basic Income

“The virus”

BBC Radio 4 Today Programme: interviewee Nadhim Zahawi [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadhim_Zahawi; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadhim_Zahawi#Expenses] said that the Government is expecting 85% of the England-resident population to agree to be vaccinated in the next few months. Asked about whether it might become compulsory to be vaccinated, Zahawi (born in Baghdad to Kurdish parents, only came to the UK aged 9) said “we are not that kind of country“.

It seems that the odd-looking showoff who owns Pimlico Plumbers [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimlico_Plumbers; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Mullins] has said that he will not employ anyone who cannot prove vaccination.

To me, the telling point is that the subject of compulsion has been raised at all. I cannot recall any previous time when it has been. What is the real agenda, bearing in mind that well over 99% of people who are infected with “Coronavirus”/”Covid-19” actually recover, most without serious ongoing problems (as far as can be seen so far)?

Another piece of news today was that there are some indications that some variants of “the virus” have mutated to the point where the vaccine(s) become ineffective. There would then have to be, presumably, further or other vaccine(s).

One asks again, what is really behind all this? The “Great Reset”? If so, how does it all play out?

Tweets seen

Laura Kuenssberg has become steadily worse over several years; completely partisan. She is, basically, a government mouthpiece. A few years ago, I was sent information about her: part-Jew. I was unaware. I knew that she is part-German (echt German, not Jew), but it turned out that (like many UK-based journalists) she is also part-Jew.

As I have previously blogged, the whole idea of topping-up poor pay by means of State benefits is an error, completely wrongheaded. What it means is that employers can pay poverty wages, wages insufficient to live upon, and the employees paid those inadequate monies have to apply for Universal Credit merely to survive on a quite basic level.

Moreover, it means that the employers, and their profits, are being subsidised by the State, meaning by all citizens, including even those receiving State benefits! This is so because even those not paying income tax still pay other taxes: those working full-time (and many working part-time) are paying National Insurance [https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance], which is a tax by any other name; all are also paying VAT on most purchases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax_in_the_United_Kingdom.

Incidentally, the standard rate at which VAT is levied has increased steadily since introduction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_tax_in_the_United_Kingdom#Historical_rates.

What that all means is, inter alia, that those receiving Universal Credit are actually partly paying for that themselves, because most are paying not only VAT but also National Insurance.

The answer is twofold: firstly, the State should pay a measure of Basic Income to all persons whose income falls below a certain level. How much? Hard to say off the cuff, but about £100 per week seems right, as a minimum.

Secondly, there must be a higher minimum wage set. How high? Again, hard to say exactly, but £10 a hour seems about right.

Enforcement of the minimum wage also needs to be stepped up.

The devil is very much in the detail in such matters, of course. Housing Benefit is another can of worms. It may be that Housing Benefit should be eliminated, and the slack taken up by a much higher Basic Income. Expensive? Yes, but so is the whole “welfare” sector, with its “assessments”, snooping, intricate administration etc; of that, not the least pertains to Housing Benefit.

More tweets seen

and now Ukraine is basically a Jew-ruled failed state. Ironic (?) in that the historical Khazars, from whom many if not most Jews descend (i.e. not from ancient “Israelites”) were, loosely and inter alia, in the area of the Ukraine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazars; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khazar_hypothesis_of_Ashkenazi_ancestry https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/scientists-reveal-jewish-history-s-forgotten-turkish-roots-a6992076.html

A group of Ashkenazic Jews in Jerusalem, circa 1885
[Ashkenazi Jews in Jerusalem, c.1885; The Independent]

Shameful. Ironic though, that so many of the Twitter-twits have reposted the above graphic while at the same time arguing for even more immigrants to enter the UK, thus depressing pay further, thus straining public services further. The self-described “Left” have nothing to offer, any more than have the finance-capitalists (who also want more immigration). Only social-national policies can beat and cut a path out of the jungle.

Historical note

Image
[n.b. for “county”, read “country”, obviously]

The quotation dates from the 1930s, I think from 1939, when Kennedy was 22: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy#Early_life_and_education.

More tweets

Shows what weapons they use on the occupied population…

History…first time, tragedy; second time, farce” [Marx]

I like it when the uniformed attendant calls that “the sacredest place“! Where the freemasons, puppets of Israel, and fraudsters sit and spout? Sacred? Ha ha!

Is Washington burning?

Meanwhile, in the “caring, sharing”, “liberal” and multikulti Netherlands…

That mayor was once egregiously rude and insolent to me when I still had a Twitter account. Who’s next? “I have a little list“…—but in view of the encroaching police state, only in my head. Nothing stains like ink (adjust quotation for online version…).

Updated version: https://fo-fo.facebook.com/englishnationalopera/videos/ive-got-a-little-list-with-lyrics-the-mikado-gilbert-an/10153631090723429/

Afternoon music

They should be on our side!

Something more peaceful…

Someone I Met Recently

A couple of days ago, I needed to buy a new mouse for my laptop computer and also to ask advice on a technical issue. I decided to go to a PC World outlet about 15 miles from where I now live. The PC World store was outside a small town on the coast of Southern England. I was there by 0900 hrs, its opening time. A routine matter, of course, but I felt that I should blog, briefly, about it because it confirmed some of what I have been saying online for years.

There was only one other customer in the large hangar-like store at nine in the morning. I was greeted on going to the service desk by a youngish blonde woman who looked rather fed up. I feared that she would be surly or unhelpful. I could not have been more wrong.

The woman, who was not as young as she looked (she turned out to have a daughter aged 16; well, the police now also look young to me…) dealt with my technical question in a matter of seconds (completely correctly, it later transpired). She also directed me to the part of of the store which displayed “mice”. I chose one, brought it back and, the store now being empty, was told that I could pay for it there at the enquiries desk rather than going to a check-out. I did that.

It might be asked at this point why I am bothering to write about this? Well, I ended up having a chat with the blonde woman employee who had been so useful and helpful, and what she said was very concerning. I don’t know why she confided in me, whom she had only just met, except that people often do. They seem to divine that I can keep a secret, for one thing, though that does not apply in this case. I think that people also know that I want to help if I can.

The blonde woman worked full-time in the PC World store, but lived in a housing association property and received Housing Benefit to pay for the rent or part of the rent. That alone confirmed some of my expressed views over the years. Here she was, in a full-time job, and moreover one which actually required some skill and knowledge, which job she was doing really competently too (as I myself saw), yet was unable to pay her modest rent (after all, this was a housing association property) out of her pay!

Now this is just plain wrong. Here we have a large chain, part of a group (Dixons Carphone, formerly Dixons Group) which, in the financial year 2017-2018, made (pre-tax) profits of £382 million, yet is not paying its staff enough so that they can even pay their domestic rent! Instead, PC World relies on the State to stump up monies (Housing Benefit and also, perhaps, Working Tax Credit— I did not talk to the woman in such detail).

In other words, the profits of the employer are being bolstered by the State, meaning taxpayers (and including, at least via National Insurance and VAT etc, the employee herself in this case).

Previous visits to PC World had been far less satisfactory. That woman had made the difference, yet was struggling to survive. When will British businesses realize that they are only as good as their employees, at all levels?

There is something wrong about a system or society in which the pay received by an employee for full-time work is not enough to allow her even to pay her rent.

Further, I was told that, because the Housing Benefit was delayed by a few days, routinely, the woman had fallen into arrears and, though the arrears were always only in existence for a few days, the Housing Association had taken her to court at least once and, as a result, she had had to pay £100-something in court costs and also a financial impost of about the same to the Housing Association! This surely must be seen as unfair and unjust.

The woman also told me that her daughter was autistic (I do not know, of course, to what extent) and had been getting Disability Living Allowance (DLA) in respect of that. Recently, the daughter had reached the age of 16. As a result, she had been forced off DLA and forced to undertake a “test” for “Personal Independence Payment” or PIP [off-piste, someone must one day do a sketch on the vulgar cheesy names for such things: “Personal Independence Payment”, “Jobseeker’s Allowance”, “Job Centre” etc].

The daughter had, subsequently, been awarded nothing. So suddenly, this girl, long diagnosed as autistic, had now, despite the diagnosis and her previously accepted status, been cut off from State funds by reason only of a change in policy by government (Iain Dunce Duncan Smith and the jew “lord” Freud, Esther McVey, not to mention David Gauke and Chris Grayling etc).

I went away from that encounter at PC World thinking about how unjust and in fact how simply inefficient the system in the UK is, in that instead of a person being able to work and provide for herself and her daughter and/or get help from the State in a simple manner, she (a useful member of society at that) was being made anxious and being forced to jump through hoops in order to survive.

The present system is not efficient, is callous and unfair and is a complicated maze. Hopeless. Parliament is hopeless. “Democracy” (as we know it) is hopeless. The MPs and “peers” are hopeless. Business is not pulling its weight. The people are not only not being helped but are being impeded unnecessarily by the overall system in which they live and work.

Notes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_World_(retailer)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-44286924

Basic Income and the Welfare State– some ideas and reminiscences

Overview

At various times in history, there was either no social welfare system at all, or one which depended on spontaneous or systemized charity: individual alms-giving in the Christian, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu and other traditions; more organized supply of food, shelter or money as in the ancient Roman dole, Renaissance attempts at poor relief and the cheerless “workhouses” of 19thC England (which in fact continued in places in some form or another until the Second World War and the emergence of the postwar Welfare State).

It is a matter for historical debate whether organized “welfare” in Europe started with the mediaeval Roman Catholic church or in the 19thC with Bismarck, who set up in Prussia and then in the unified Germany a system not unlike those which emerged later in other European countries (eg in the UK under Lloyd George) and further afield: for example, Uruguay had one of the most generous “welfare” (social security) systems in the world until it collapsed in the 1970s under the weight of its expense.

However, the Roman Catholic and other religious and other non-State providers of “welfare” rarely give out money. They supply, variously, food, shelter, often educational and medical help.

The more modern “welfare” systems, eg in the UK, were based on the idea of social insurance: during a working lifetime, you paid in; in periods of unemployment, disability, sickness, old age, you were paid out. In the UK, this has become largely notional. Some tax is still designated as “National Insurance” payment but of course is just an extra type of income tax, fed straight into central funds and not in any way ringfenced.

Some anecdotal evidence

Like many people of my age (b. 1956) in the UK, I had to request State assistance occasionally in the past. This is or was far more common than generally supposed. The writer J.K. Rowling, now supposedly worth £100 million, has described how only the more generous –compared to today– social security of the 1990s enabled her to sit in cafes (partly to keep warm) with her baby, and to write the stories that not much later became Harry Potter. More egregiously, the vampire of Britain’s social security system, Iain Duncan Smith, has admitted that he claimed social security after having left the Army (ignominiously, having only achieved the rank of lieutenant after six years). In fact, Smith, or as he prefers to be known, Duncan Smith (the Duncan not being part of his original surname), claimed social security under false pretences, making him a hypocrite as well as what Australians apparently call a “dole blodger” and (as seen in the scandal of his fake CV and Parliamentary expenses) a fraud.

Certainly, there are those who abuse the social security system. In the past, that was far more common, because the almost Stasi level of control and surveillance that now exists for claimants in Britain had not then been put into place. The system was itself less punitive, less quick to demand impossible levels of enthusiasm for what is now and vulgarly called “jobseeking”.

I knew one woman, a citizen of the Soviet Union, who, having run away from her husband in New Zealand, came to the UK and claimed social security (including disability benefits). How could this happen? Well, her ex-husband, though resident in New Zealand, had a British passport (was British citizen) and had the right to reside in the UK. That meant that his estranged wife could do likewise, even though she had no other connection with the UK and had never even landed there! In fact, that woman never had a job (beyond odd occasional part-time jobs teaching Russian conversation at evening classes). She was supplied with monies for being slightly disabled (kidneys), monies for not having a job, monies for having two children of school age. She was also supplied with free housing. I encountered that person in 1981. She was, I heard, still collecting from the “British taxpayer” in 1996 and is almost certainly still collecting (now State Pension too!) in 2017…All monies legally-obtained, without fraud of any kind.

Another case. A young man (in the mid-1990s), from a very affluent family, who, nonetheless, was “unemployed” and so received whatever unemployment benefit was called then, as well as Housing Benefit for the large flat he occupied in Marylebone, London. In fact, the flat was owned (under cloak of a private company) by the young man’s mother (who lived in Surrey), while the young man had his own freelance work as both a designer and a male model. In this case, there certainly was some kind of dishonesty, both on the part of the young man and his mother. I doubt that they could do the same today, but I last heard of them over 20 years ago, so do not know.

The above two examples seem to show abuse of a system, but here is another case from the 1990s; less obvious, less easy to judge: a single mother of a school-age child, she about 40-y-o, with no relevant educational qualifications. This lady had a small, indeed micro, informal business, making coffee and selling home-made sandwiches to the ladies having their hair done at a large London hairdressing salon. A “Trotter’s Traders” enterprise (“no income tax, no VAT” etc…). About £200 profit on a good week, but more usually less. Not enough to live on, even then, paying Central London rent. That lady was getting State benefits as a single mother; she was getting Housing Benefit too. Now it could be said that she was “defrauding” the State, but her earned income was not enough to live on without State help. Had she given up her private work, the State would have saved nothing, the economy generally would have suffered from her not earning and spending, she and her son would have suffered considerably.

Basic Income

For me, the answer to the above lies in Basic Income, a certain amount paid to every citizen (nb. not to everyone just off the boat, or those who have walked through the Channel Tunnel). The level at which it is set will be, inevitably, contentious. Some will end up with less than under the existing system of State benefits etc. However, it has the merit of certainty. Everyone knows that x-amount will be paid weekly or monthly; those over a certain (to be decided) income can have the Basic Income payment clawed back via the tax system. It may be that everyone should also get free local transport.

The benefits of Basic Income are several. Every citizen will have the basic wherewithal of life: food, shelter, transport etc, without being forced to jump through hoops, without being bullied or snooped upon. The State will save vast amounts on administration, salaries of penpushers, maintenance of useless and expensive buildings such as those called (another vulgarity) “jobcentres”. There will be little scope for fraud and deception, because everyone under a certain income will get the same amount. If society wants to provide the disabled, sick etc with more than the basic amount, then an assessment programme (decent, honest, not cruel, unlike the existing ones) can be put into place for that.

This is obviously the way to go.